While
friendship between women in Jane Austen’s novels has engaged
some critics, the novels themselves seem to direct us to consider
such relationships unimportant precursors to the heroine’s
betrothal to the hero. Readers may justly assume that Jane Austen
took a dim view of the cult of friendship in popular novels;1
its characteristic excesses of style find place in her own fiction
only when such hypocrites as Isabella Thorpe, Lucy Steele, or Mary
Crawford profess instant “affection” for the heroines of
Northanger Abbey,
Sense and Sensibility,
and Mansfield Park
with motives that range from opportunism to malice and envy to
creating a false persona. But it would be a mistake, I think, to
assume from these burlesque portraits that Jane Austen sees women’s
friendship as necessarily unimportant, or even secondary, in
comparison with marriage. Even when critics share Mr. Knightley’s
judgement of Emma’s self-indulgent “interest” in
Harriet Smith, they go on (as I think the novelist invites us) to
deplore the failed friendship between Emma and Jane Fairfax. And
when women’s friendship is permitted to influence the heroine,
it is accorded much importance. Janet Todd refers to Jane Austen’s
“distrust of [female] friendship” in her later work,2
and Lady Russell’s inadvertent betrayal of Anne Elliot before
Persuasion
begins usually comes in for more attention than lowly Mrs. Smith’s
corresponding care, so significant to the novel’s dénouement,
for her mentor/protegée’s best interests. (In fact,
according to some critics, the evils of Lady Russell’s limited
perspective are matched by the pernicious reticence of Mrs. Smith,
who hesitates to reveal the anti-hero’s treachery almost too
long.)3
Mrs. Smith’s significance in the novel, however, might be
simply that she provides a trustworthy, equal – in Janet Todd’s
terms, “horizontal” – friend for Anne who is
otherwise thrown upon her unsympathetic family and her short-sighted
confidante Lady Russell.

It would seem that female friendship is
exploitative, often silly, occasionally dangerous, but never, in the
end, particularly significant. Even Rachel Brownstein, who writes
sensitively of women’s friendships in Jane Austen’s
fiction, and who happily notes that “Two things about Jane
Austen’s life are important: … she was a spinster, and a
sister,” concludes that “[Jane] Austen’s heroines,
who must acknowledge that they are like other women, must in the end
leave the
company of their sex …. ” She writes in the context of
Emma’s “foolish connection
with simple Harriet Smith.”4
(Emma’s cultivation of Harriet is of course problematical,5
but I would like us to reconsider such customary easy dismissals.)

Of course, the master plot of Jane
Austen’s novels, courtship, makes the single-sex relationship
an apparently marginal aspect in her fiction, as is appropriate: she
wrote for readers who preferred their novels cut to pattern. But to
see courtship as a flat design may be to miss the layers of Jane
Austen’s exploration of relationships. The sceptical reader –
one who suspects the author herself of some scepticism about pat
fictional order – need not conspire with the obvious dictates
of the form to the extent of ignoring Jane Austen’s collateral
focus, according with her works’ boundaries, on the importance
of “sisterhood” in the lives of her woman characters.

One logical point of departure for a study of Jane
Austen’s women’s relationships is the juvenilia.
As an introduction to the body of her work, these stories, plays,
burlesques, and fragments of novels can be seen as analogous to the
first seven chapters in relation to the whole of Pride
and Prejudice. The exclusively
feminine company of the Bennets and Lucases before the introduction
of Bingley, Darcy, and Wickham (and Collins) shows a society in which
none of the girls seems really to be “out,” as they
discuss men and hats and friendship.6
(The earliest indication of Caroline Bingley’s treacherous
nature, after all, is her palpably false friendship for Jane Bennet.)
As the juvenilia
date from the pre-courtship era of Jane Austen’s own life, they
admit a focus on friendship as a unique form of female experience.
And the works themselves, though the majority are apparently about
relations between men and women, often abandon a courtship pattern.
“Frederic and Elfrida,” from Volume
the First, placed quite early in
Chapman’s chronology, is titled to suggest a romance, but the
first two paragraphs describing the hero and heroine immediately give
way to a digression about Charlotte, Elfrida’s “intimate
friend,” whose suicide follows shortly, after a pair of sisters
is introduced further to divert attention from the eponymous couple.
Love and Freindship,
the source of my title,7
is easily more concerned with women’s friendships than with
courtship or marriage. This burlesque novel is in the form of
Laura’s letters describing her picaresque, romantic exploits to
Marianne, the daughter of Laura’s childhood friend. The
spurious emotion and spontaneous attachment of false friendship are
of course the butt of Jane Austen’s satire, as they are in
Northanger Abbey,
Sense and Sensibility,
and Pride and Prejudice.
But it is important to note that friendships, however comically
treated, have greater endurance in this early novel than do
marriages. Friendship is even the occasion for the novel’s
being written.

The primary pairing in Love
and Freindship is between Laura and
Sophia, the wife of her husband’s best friend. While marriages
in the novel seem to be prompted more by a desire to flout parental
authority and economic prudence than by mutual attachment, the
requirements for friendship are precise, if typical of sentimental
(and mock-sentimental) fashion. When the penniless Edward elopes
with her to his friend Augustus’s seat, Laura is the more
grateful for the presence of Sophia for having been “deprived
during the course of 3 weeks of a real friend”:

Sophia was rather above the middle
size; most elegantly formed. A soft languor spread over her lovely
features, but increased their Beauty. – It was the
Charectarestic of her Mind – . She was all Sensibility and
Feeling. We flew into each others arms and after having exchanged
vows of mutual Freindship for the rest of our Lives, instantly
unfolded to each other the most inward Secrets of our Hearts –.
(85)8

Within two pages, young Laura has
already met two young women who define the opposite of friendship.
The first is Edward’s sister Augusta:

There
was disagreeable Coldness and Forbidding Reserve in [Augusta’s]
reception of me which was equally Distressing and Unexpected. None
of that interesting Sensibility or amiable Simpathy [was seen] in her
manners and Address to me … which should have distinguished
our introduction to each other. Her Language was neither warm, nor
affectionate, her expressions of regard were neither animated nor
cordial; her arms were not opened to receive me to her Heart, tho’
my own were extended to press her to mine. (82)

And Laura has met Lady Dorothea, who
had been Edward’s father’s choice for his wife, another
candidate for disdain: “She staid but half an hour and neither
in the Course of her Visit, confided to me any of her secret
thoughts, nor requested me to confide in her, any of Mine”
(84). It is true that Edward and Augustus, whose meeting follows
that of their wives, also “fl[y] into each other’s arms”
(86), their sentimental behaviour evoking the alternate swoons of
Laura and Sophia, but this friendship hardly parallels the women’s
in importance. For one thing, Edward and Augustus promptly leave the
scene, the latter arrested for debt (and possibly theft as well), and
eventually they leave the story entirely when they are killed in a
phaeton accident. Furthermore, despite the broad treatment of the
friendship of Laura and Sophia, the two women prove resourceful to
each other in crises, certainly more so than their husbands. Their
adventures include a journey to Scotland; the discovery of their
(mutual) grandfather; an experiment in matchmaking, as they prompt an
elopement between an indifferent heiress and a fortune-hunter; and
the separate achievements of an elegy on the death of Edward (by
Laura), and a true heroine’s swoon (by Sophia), one that leads
to a feverish death.

By the end of her absurd trials, Laura
has learned sufficient vulgar prudence to submit to an income from
her late husband’s father, but notes plaintively that “the
unsimpathetic Baronet offered it more on account of my being the
Widow of Edward than in being the refined and amiable Laura”
(108). Here may be found the lesson that she should impart to
Marianne in her review of the story: society deems the feelings of
women insignificant, compared with the achievements of men. But
Laura herself never rejects her earliest sentimental values. The
only direct advice that she will concede to pass to Marianne is the
dying speech of Sophia: “Beware of swoons Dear Laura ….
A frenzy fit is not one quarter so pernicious; it is an exercise to
the Body and if not too violent, is I dare say conducive to Health in
its consequences – Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not
faint – ” (102).

As comical and apparently insignificant
as this brief epistolary piece may seem, its claim on our attention
is assured when we consider the relationship between Love and
Freindship and Sense and Sensibility, where one of the two
heroines displays an excessive sentimentality quite reminiscent of
Laura and Sophia9. Like them, Marianne, who bears the
name of Laura’s tutee, allows her romantic definition of
“noble” behaviour to obscure her moral judgement and her
common sense; her near fatal twilight walks cause an illness that is
particularly communicable to such young women, and Sophia has died of
the same disease. But the shrewdly “sentimental” Lucy
Steele provides a contrast in the novel with Marianne’s real
feeling, making us unable to dismiss Marianne’s excesses, even
if she were not so important to Elinor, the representative of
sense, throughout the novel. The very last words of Sense and
Sensibility, after all, pay tribute to the sisters’
neighbourly friendship as “not the least considerable” of
their “merits and happiness.”10 Even in Love
and Freindship and elsewhere in the juvenilia, the studied
romantic dogma that may direct characters’ lives can create
frequent comedy and satire, without deflecting our serious
attention.11

The unfinished Catharine;Or, The Bower
continues Jane Austen’s exploration of the relationships of
women. Choosing to place her orphaned heroine in the unpleasant
charge of a severe Aunt, the author affords her few romantic
possibilities. As we meet the young Catharine, she is afforded
“constant relief in all her misfortunes” by “a fine
shady Bower, the work of her own infantine Labours assisted by those
of two young Companions who had resided in the same village –
.” Catharine’s12
“imagination was warm, and in her Freindships, as well as in
the whole tenure of her Mind, she was enthousiastic. This beloved
Bower had been the united work of herself and two amiable Girls, for
whom since her earliest Years, she had felt the tenderest regard”
(193). Clearly, it would seem, the description of the bower in the
first pages of the story identifies Catharine as susceptible to
sentimental cliché; her relation to the sisters Cecilia and
Mary must be similarly silly. But just as the reader has settled
into such a comfortable judgement, the sisters are hustled off the
scene to varied unhappy fates which might have proved adventures for
a more conventional kind of orphaned heroine, while the reader is
left behind with Catharine and her recourse to “this arbour …
[which] encouraged … the tender and Melancholy recollections
of hours rendered pleasant by” her lost friends (194).

Even as she will do in Sense
and Sensibility and Northanger
Abbey (whose heroine shares Catharine’s
name), Jane Austen tempts her readers to an undiscriminating
dismissal of the strong feelings of sentimental young women, only to
present us with caricatures that complicate our response. In
Catharine,
it is Camilla Stanley, whose family pays a visit to the heroine’s
aunt, who represents the ignorance and shallow artifice of false
friendship and provides a contrast with the enduring ties, now kept
by correspondence, between the heroine and the sisters who have left.
Camilla’s abuses of language and her taste in literature
resemble Isabella Thorpe’s, and when the reductive dialogues
that pass for conversation with Camilla send Catharine to the haven
of “her dear Bower,” the reader is ready to adjust the
value of that retreat (207). Despite her wishes that the arrival of
Camilla can “in some degree make amends for the loss of Cecilia
& Mary,” Catharine is forced to conclude the contrary:

She
found no variety in her conversation; She received no information
from her but in fashions, and no Amusement but in her performance on
the Harpsichord … and when [Catharine] had learnt from her,
how large their house in Town was, when the fashionable Amusements
began, who were the celebrated Beauties and who the best Millener,
Camilla had nothing further to teach …. (198, 201-2)

(Were
the harp substituted for the “Harpsichord,” the
description might suit Mary Crawford.) Camilla’s equally
shallow mother applauds the stylish custom of friendship and
correspondence between young women, while Catharine’s aunt,
less “modern,” judges “a correspondence between
Girls as productive of no good, and as the frequent origin of
imprudence & Error by the effect of pernicious advice and bad
Example” (210-11). Jane Austen is inviting us to mediate
between the trivial, false “sensibility” of Camilla and
her London friends and the equally extreme view of Catharine’s
guardian. Camilla is moved to remonstrate with her hostess, “
‘But who knows what you might have been Ma’am, if you had
had a Correspondent; perhaps it would have made you quite a different
Creature’ ” (211), and, for once, the reader is inclined
to agree with her.

Camilla’s one great advantage to
Catharine would seem to be her possession of a brother, Edward
Stanley, who arrives briefly to dance with and delight the heroine.
But Jane Austen soon removes Edward from the scene, and even before
his departure, while Catharine is being electrified by his presence,
she is busily assessing his defects and whether they “merely
proceded from a vivacity always pleasing in Young Men” or
“testif[ied] a weak or vacant Understanding” (235-36).

When the
novel breaks off, the possibility of a visit from Catharine’s
married friend Cecilia is the only likely change in the heroine’s
future. “Her bower,” we are told, “alone retained
its interest in her feelings,” and though “perhaps that
was oweing to the particular remembrance it brought to [Catharine’s]
mind of Edw[ar]d Stanley,” generally the enduring relationship
in the novel is that between Catharine and her old, now absent
friends (239). Their fates, ultimately unknown, seem not to promise
well: Cecilia has been sent out to India where she has, as designed,
been married off “to a Man of double her own age, whose
disposition was not amiable) and whose Manners were unpleasing,
though his Character was respectable,” but who may, as
Catharine feelingly points out, “ ‘be a Tyrant, or a
Fool or both for what she knows to be the Contrary’ ”
(194, 205). Mary, the younger sister, has gained the unenviable
position of poor relation and ladies’ companion to a pair of
spoiled girls – friends, in fact, of Camilla – who spend
most of the year in Scotland. Catharine assesses Mary’s lot:
“There was not indeed that hopelessness of sorrow in her
situation as in her sister[’]s; she was not married, and could
yet look forward to a change in her circumstances …”
(195). Perhaps Catharine here unwittingly identifies the paradox of
the courtship plot: that, while single women have little but marriage
to hope for, marriage is the completely “hopeless” state
– whether for good or ill – because it is the state in
which a woman is fixed, even more firmly than Catharine is imprisoned
by her aunt or Mary by her subservient position.

Jane Austen makes the charms of the almost-hero of
Catharine: Or, The Bower
equivical (Edward “had scarcely a fixed opinion on [any]
Subject” [231], and he is, after all, Camilla’s brother),
and, just when Catharine is preparing to overlook his faults, the
author suddenly dismisses him altogether. Feminine accomplishments,
on the other hand, endure and are valuable; Catharine’s
correspondence with Camilla soon ends, but the letters to Cecilia and
Mary continue. The structure of the bower, moreover, that
co-operative achievement of friendship, remains as the novel trails
off, a symbol of the relative importance of women’s
relationships even in the society Jane Austen describes. Though the
subject of the later novels seems unequivocally “love”
rather than “friendship,” then, it may be useful to
consider how Jane Austen, who never married herself but carried on
important correspondences and friendships throughout her hardly
hopeless life, might be undermining the sole importance of marriage
in the lives of her heroines.

3 See K. K.
Collins, “Prejudice, Persuasion,
and the Puzzle of Mrs. Smith,” Persuasions,
No. 6 (December, 1984), pp. 40-43. In “Mrs. Smith and the
Morality of Persuasion,”
K. K. Collins reviews the traditional attacks on Mrs. Smith as either
an awkward plot device or an opportunist who intends to use Anne’s
influence with Mr. Elliot to gain her lost fortune, Nineteenth
Century Fiction, 30 (December, 1975),
pp. 383-97.

5 Janet Todd
analyzes the relationship, in the tradition of Marvin Mudrick, as
modelled on a “flawed marriage” (p. 285); my view would
salvage some aspects of Emma’s “use” of Harriet as
virtues of friendship. For Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar,
however, as with many critics, female friendship in Jane Austen’s
fiction is merely “female rivalry” for attention from
men, The Madwoman in the Attic
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 126.

6 I should
note that my idyllic evocation of the Bennets at home is a direct
contradiction of most views of that novel. In Communities
of Women: An Idea in Fiction
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1978), for
example, Nina Auerbach deems that women “lead a purgatorial
existence together” in all
of Jane Austen’s novels. (See pp. 35-55; pp. 47-48.)

7 In his
notes to Love and Freindship,
Brian C. Southam points out that “We fainted Alternately on a
Sofa” is an echo of Sheridan’s stage direction in The
Critic, III, i Volume
the Second (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1963), p. 211.